1975 Church Committee Hearings

EXTENDED ENDNOTES

ALL notes correspond to the endnotes in Patriotic Betrayal, supply additional information or evidence, and should be read together.

Note 8: NSA/CIA Divorce Agreement. The settlement with the CIA did not end petty forms of harassment of the NSA. In June 1968, COSEC staff member, Ron J. J. Bell, notified the NSA that it owed COSEC $13, 608.69. COSEC then forgave $2,000, and NSA made several payments before declaring an end to the absurdity of being saddled, in effect, with a debt to the CIA. See FOIA Files, “Student Group, Sued for $9,600, Says CIA Should Pay the Debt,” Washington Post, (no date on the clipping, circa June 1968). The ISC sued NSA for $9,600 in small claims court, a figure surely chosen because the court heard cases when the amount at issue was under $10,000. USNSA countersued. As the case went forward, someone in the CIA noted on a routing slip that the CIA was “not a sue-able Agency.” FOIA (CIA) #175 copy of Civil Action No. 494-70, ISC v. USNSA, May 1970. The lawsuit on behalf of the ISC/COSEC was handled by the law firm Surrey, Karasik, Greene and Hill by a freshly minted lawyer, Stanton D. Anderson, later of the Nixon White House. It also happened to be the law firm of Greg Gallo, the former NSA President (1963-64) and former Vice President of the United States Youth Council (1964-1966).

Note 13: James N. Green, Brown University, recently made use of the 1968 Helms’ report “Restless Youth” in an article by the same name: “Restless Youth”” The 1968 Brazilian Student Movement as Seen from Washington.” It may be found at: http://www.wordwendang.com/en/word_edu/0722/44427.html

Note 15: KGP plot. Michael Ansara’s files contain copies of the document that CIA Director Helms described in his memoir as a KGB gray letter. Thus, the document exists, and it is possible it was a KGB forgery, but to extrapolate from it that a Soviet-back mole had penetrated COSEC and plotted to expose the CIA hand suggests that Helms did not understand how militant the students in ISC/COSEC had become or how little patience they had for the Cold War.

Note 18: KGB plot media circulation: According to Angus McKenzie (Secrets), the CIA refused to declassify a memorandum that details columnist Carl Rowan’s activities to combat the Ramparts exposé, and his charge that the KGB was behind the disclosures. Before becoming a columnist, Rowan headed the U.S. Information Agency, and participated in general psychological warfare activities, most of which were classified as “white,” meaning open or overt, but USIA also engaged “black” psychological warfare, in which the hand of the U.S. Government is disguised, and grey psychological warfare, a mixture of the two.

Note 49: Militants who became moderates: The most obvious examples of former militants who came to power and ruled as moderates are Nelson Mandela and Thabo Mbeki of South Africa. Although a generation apart, both were considered ANC militants and anathema to CIA anti-communist liberals.

Note 50: IUS leaders and Czech Spring 1968:

In an 2008 interview, Zybnek Vokrouhlický [now deceased], the leader of the IUS during Prague Spring, described how he was frog marched out of the IUS Secretariat in early 1969 by hard line Communists [members of the Czech Central Committee, and newly-installed leaders from the Czech National Union of Students] without a pencil or a personal item. He told me that both Olof Palme, then Prime Minister of Sweden, and an IUS Russian friend, Sasha [Aleksandr]Lebedev*, offered him asylum in Stockholm and Moscow, but the latter option would have required him to say that he was in the wrong. “I told him, Sasha, I cannot say to millions of Czech young people who remember me that I was mistaken about the Soviet invasion…I cannot do this.” Vokrouhlický rejected both offers; he did not want to leave Czechoslovakia or his family. (*Aleksandr Lebedev returned to Prague as a Minister Counsellor in the Soviet Embassy, deputy to the Ambassador. He and Vok remained friends.)

On December 3, 1991, Radio Free Europe and Radio Liberty (No. 228) reported on that the Ambassador [Lebedev] had transmitted to the Czech government over 200 pages of archival material related to Prague Spring. Most recently, Lebedev was the Soviet Ambassador to Turkey.

Vok, as he was known to all, eventually found work driving a cab. He moonlighted as a document translator, since he was fluent in multiple languages. After the Velvet Resolution brought Vaclav Havel to power, he worked for the Design Centrum in Prague, helping to promote the small and medium business sector.

Jiri Pelikán, head of Czech TV during Prague Spring, went into exile, first to England, then to Italy. During a 2006 interview, Gwyn Morgan, the former British COSEC Secretary General (1964-65), told me that he helped Pelikán to hide in England during this time when he feared for his life. Pelikán died in 1999, but I was able to contact Pelikán’s widow, Jitka Frantová. In an exchange of emails (April 18 and 19, 2009), Frantová said she did not recognize Gwyn Morgan’s name specifically, but wrote that Pelikán had numerous friends in England who assisted him. During his long exile in Italy, he published a magazine of dissent, Listy, served in the European Parliament (1977-89), and joined Charter 77, the human rights group. After the Communist regime fell, he became an advisor to Vaclav Havel. Over the years, Pelikán survived both assassination and kidnapping attempts by the StB, the Czech secret service.

Joseph Grohman, the first leader of IUS, did not suffer immediately from his dissident role in Prague Spring. He served as the Czech representative to UNESCO until 1976, when upon landing at the Prague airport, he was arrested, accused of spying for the West. He was tried and imprisoned until the mid-1990s. By then, Grohman had divorced and remarried. His first wife, Jarmila Marsáková, told me in a 2008 interview that she believes he may have been betrayed by his second wife, not because he spied for the West, but because he held views considered subversive by the regime.

Notes 67-77 Intelligence reporting: While participants have used Iran and South Africa as two examples to illustrate their concern over their reports on foreign students, this issue has been raised before in a more general way (not students specific) in conjunction with CIA actions in Guatemala (1954); Iraq (1963); Indonesia (1965); among others.

Guatemala: According to Seymour Hersh (The Dark Side of Camelot), the CIA prepared in 1953 “a disposal list” of 58 Guatemalans suspected of communist leanings, and discussed in detail the possibility of assassinations, although Hersh says they were not carried out. One rightly imagines the disposal list to be a smaller subset of the general list of those suspected of communist leanings.

Iraq: In additional to former National Security Council Roger Morris’ citation (See Chapter 19, Endnote 62), two other sources discuss the lists and the scale of the killings: Hanna Batatu, “CIA Lists Provide Basis for Iraqi Bloodbath,” Global Policy Forum Excerpt from The Old Social Classes and the Revolutionary Movements of Iraq (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1978); and Peter and Marion Sluglett, Iraq Since 1958 (London: I.B. Taurus, 1990).

Indonesia: American Embassy political officer, Robert J. Martens, has acknowledged that a small group within the embassy prepared a list of 5,000 names of suspected Communists during the 1965 coup, and delivered them to the Indonesian Army. See, “C.I.A. Tie Asserted in Indonesia Purge, New York Times, July 12, 1990. The overthrow of Sukarno resulted in a massacre of untold thousands, one estimate is upward of one million people. http://www.indonesia-digest.net/3200genocide.htm Other scholars and experts are agreed that a minimum of 500,000 people were killed. In 1999, according to Wikipedia, Parliament set up a Truth and Reconciliation Commission but it’s legitimacy was overturned by the court. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Indonesian_killings_of_1965%E2%80%9366

See also: Jonathan Haslam, Russia’s Cold War: From the October Revolution to the Fall of the Wall (New Haven: Yale university Press, 2011). Haslam writes that American Embassy official (Political Section) in Djakarta, Robert Martens, claimed the lists were handed over to an aide to Indonesia minister Adam Malik. Martens’ attitude is cavalier, to say the least: “It really was a big help to the army. They probably killed a lot of people, and I probably have a lot of blood on my hands, but that’s not all bad.” (p. 228)

South Africa: Baad observed (Note 73) that most CIA officials didn’t like the South African regime and were unlikely to share intelligence with it, but this statement ignores evidence to the contrary. See especially, Donald Culverson (Contesting Apartheid), cited in Chapter 17. Culverson writes about early-to-mid 1960s: “Perhaps the best illustration of the depth of the U.S. commitment to Pretoria was the work of the Central Intelligence Agency. After South Africa withdrew from the British Commonwealth in 1961, the CIA assumed a larger role in the coordination and training of Pretoria’s intelligence services. … the CIA enthusiastically assisted the government’s campaign of infiltration and destruction of liberal, as well as radical, opposition groups.” (p. 42)

Additional note: The appointment books carried by NSA international staff and described as success diaries were trademarked, Success Diary.